Fluorescence diffuse optical tomography (fDOT) is a noninvasive imaging technique that makes it possible to quantify the spatial distribution of fluorescent tracers in small animals. fDOT image reconstruction is commonly performed by means of iterative methods such as the algebraic reconstruction technique (ART). The useful results yielded by more advanced l1-regularized techniques for signal recovery and image reconstruction, together with the recent publication of Split Bregman (SB) procedure, led us to propose a new approach to the fDOT inverse problem, namely, ART-SB. This method alternates a cost-efficient reconstruction step (ART iteration) with a denoising filtering step based on minimization of total variation of the image using the SB method, which can be solved efficiently and quickly. We applied this method to simulated and experimental fDOT data and found that ART-SB provides substantial benefits over conventional ART.

This work was supported by Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (FPI program, TEC2008-06715), EU-FP7 project FMTXCT-201792, the Community of Madrid (ARTEMIS S2009/DPI-1802), European Regional Development Funds (FEDER), and CDTI under the CENIT program (AMIT Project, CEN-20101014).